Time to be positive about negative data?

Journal article

Karl Popper (1902-1994), one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, writes in Conjectures and Refutations (Harper & Row, 1963): “Criticism of our conjectures is of decisive importance: by bringing out our mistakes it makes us understand the difficulties of the problem which we are trying to solve. This is how we become better acquainted with our problem, and able to propose more mature solutions: the very refutation of a theory –that is, of any serious tentative solution to our problem- is always a step forward that takes us nearer to the truth. And this is how we can learn from our mistakes”.

This special issue of Osteoarthritis and Cartilage was devised to capture important negative findings in in vivo models of osteoarthritis (OA), both with respect to pathogenesis and treatment of the disease. Negative results are mostly met with disappointment and dismissed by researchers as ‘failed’ experiments. It is somewhat ironic - in a disease where we collectively lack mechanistic understanding and we have no benchmarks for what is right (true) and what is wrong (false)- that we seem to deem negative studies (i.e., studies where the results force us to refute our hypothesis) as being less informative than positive ones. This is concerning when we consider that the use of murine models in OA research has expanded exponentially since the turn of this century, and they are increasingly being used as a screening tool for studying putative mediators of disease, often without strong mechanistic rationale.

Authors: Vincent, T; Malfait, A

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Journal: Osteoarthritis Cartilage
• Volume: 25
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 351-353
• Publication date: 2017-02-01
• Acceptance date: 2017-01-29
• DOI: 10.1016/j.joca.2017.01.016
• EISSN: 1522-9653
• ISSN: 1063-4584
• Language: English
• Keywords: Editorial